Growing up, I was told that people who smoke spend a lot of money yearly smoking, and if they decide to quit smoking and focus on saving that money they would have X amount of dollars by the end of the year and that will be enough to achieve whatever financial goal they wanted to achieve. That didn’t sit right with me because usually you hear this advise from people who don’t smoke and if you ask them what they do with their money since they don’t smoke, they usually go blank. It’s always easier to dish out advice to someone else, because it’s easier to judge.
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Some people have equated that to coffee, they said, instead of buying that cup of coffee everyday, why not save that money. For instance, if you spend $5 on a cup of coffee everyday, in 365 days in a year you spend about $1825, instead of spending that money on coffee, why not save that money. But if you ask this person giving you this advise if they have been able to save $1825 since they don’t drink coffee, their answer is usually No. As humans, living on this planet earth is quite hard, you have to face the government, inflation, traffic, unkind people and a lot of life challenges, we need little things that give us pleasure to get us through the day. Some people it’s cigarettes, some people it’s a cup of coffee, some people, it’s playing video games. So why try to make them feel guilty all in the name of financial advice.
Note that this does not apply to hard drugs, I wouldn’t advice anyone to be addicted to hard drugs or narcotic substances that will damage their health.
Instead of advising people to cut down little things that gives them pleasure to get through the day, why not focus that energy on protesting so the government can make life easier for citizens and make these little things more affordable for people.